Bobby Fischer

He was the first and so far only American chess player to be able to boast the title of World Champion. He won the title, beating the great Soviet master Boris Spassky in the 1972 match, in an era, between 1946 and 1991, in which he was the prerogative of the Soviet school. He is considered among the best chess players of all time.

Biography

On his birth certificate the German biophysicist Gerhardt Fischer is listed as the father. His mother Regina Wender, who was born in Switzerland to a Polish family of Jewish origins, had been a worker in a war factory and had continued to study, becoming first a teacher, then a nurse and finally a doctor, graduating from Moscow University, where she had met Gerhardt Fischer, whom she married in Moscow in 1933 and where their daughter Joan was born in 1938. In 1945 they divorced, but in the meantime Regina had returned to the United States (1939). In 1942 Regina had a love affair with Paul Nemenyi and this even appears in the records of the FBI, which secretly followed the couple's private life, suspecting that the woman could be a spy in the service of the Soviets. At the age of six, when the family moved to Brooklyn, he taught himself the game of chess by reading the instruction booklet of a chessboard. He trained with her sister and within a few weeks proved himself to be too strong a player for her. When the boy turned thirteen, her mother asked Jack Collins to be his chess instructor; he had taught several great players, including William Lombardy and Robert Byrne. Fischer spent much time in Collins' home, described by some as a father figure to the boy. Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School, but dropped out after a short time, where many teachers remembered him as a difficult person. His first real triumph came in July 1956, when he won the US junior championship which at the time qualified him for the major championship. In January 1958 he won the United States championship, called "zonal", and qualified for the interzonal tournament, a result that earned him the title of "international master". Samuel Reshevsky, the great favorite of the tournament, and the presence of all the best active American masters did not prevent Bobby, not even fifteen years old, from winning the tournament undefeated. In 1959 Fischer participated for the third time in the American championship, later renamed the "Rosenwald Tournament". Here he gave a preview of his eccentric character which later characterized the world championship against Boris Spassky. For example, he demanded that the pairings be drawn publicly, a clause also foreseen by the FIDE regulations, but in fact a whim, given that having a public or private draw did not change anything, unless someone tried to cheat, and it is very difficult to do so in a tournament . He went so far as to let the organizing committee choose his replacement, given that if he had not been satisfied he would have withdrawn. Later during the tournament he wanted the presence of his lawyer on stage to protect himself against any irregularities. They were the first evident episodes of a long series that characterized his image and his legend. He won the championship with great ease, after all in the American tournaments he won eight consecutive times, all those in which he participated. In the 1963-64 season he actually won all the matches. Fischer participated for the first time in the selections for the world championship in the 1958 interzonal tournament, held in Portoroz, Yugoslavia, where he obtained a placement useful for qualification for the candidates tournament the following year. Thanks to this result, he therefore became an "international grandmaster" at fifteen years, six months and one day (a record of precociousness that remained unbeaten until 1991, when it was surpassed by Judit Polgár). In the 1959 candidates' tournament, played in various cities of Yugoslavia, his very young age did not allow him to impose himself: he ranked 5th-6th place out of eight competitors. Among other things, the winner of the tournament Michail Tal' taught him a harsh lesson, winning all four matches played against him. At the next interzonal tournament, held in Stockholm in 1962 between January and March, he achieved a sensational result. He won the tournament by 2.5 points ahead of the runner-up, qualifying for the 1962 Candidates Tournament which was to be held in Curaçao between May and June of that year. On the Caribbean island, Tigran Petrosjan won without losing a single game and drawing 19 out of a total of 27. Tal' fell ill and had to retire, while Fischer finished in fourth place, with 8 wins, 7 defeats and 12 draws, behind Petrosjan, Keres and Geller. Fischer reacted violently: he believed that the Soviet players had agreed to short draws among themselves, allocating most of their efforts against non-Russian opponents. Once everyone else had been eliminated, the Soviets would be the only ones left to compete "at home" for the right to challenge the world champion. The Soviets entrusted the answering task to Paul Keres, who denied any accusations leveled against the Soviet players. It was the 1970 interzonal tournament in Palma de Mallorca that put Fischer on the path to the world championship. He showed off his best skills in the candidates' matches, producing a streak that has never been equaled: both Mark Tajmanov and Bent Larsen were demolished 6-0 without draws. Only former world champion Tigran Petrosjan, Fischer's last opponent in the candidates' matches, partially managed to stem his strength, putting an end to the long string of victories, but nevertheless Fischer won the match 6.5 to 2, 5. In 1971 the US champion had obtained the right to challenge Boris Spassky for the world title. What the press, especially the Western one, immediately dubbed "the meeting of the century" between Spassky and Fischer took place in Reykjavík, Iceland, from July to September 1972. At the beginning, given his fickle temperament and the many requests that posed to the organizers, it seemed unlikely that Fischer would show up, but at the last minute he decided to participate. It has been said that a phone call from Henry Kissinger, appealing to his patriotism, helped save the meeting; the fact that a $125,000 donation raised the prize pool to $250,000 was probably another contributing factor. The first match only served to increase the tension surrounding the match. Fischer, who had never defeated Spassky in their few previous meetings, seemed to have an easy time with the black pieces when he made a monumental mistake, the kind not easily seen in a game between grandmasters. Following his defeat, Fischer made further demands of the organizers, and when these were not met he refused to show up, causing Spassky to be awarded the victory by default. Legend has it that this was the most acute moment of the constant struggle with the organizers, Fischer received, when he had already booked the flight back to the United States, a phone call from the national security advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger, who convinced him to continue for the honor of his country. History or myth, Fischer played and won the third match, after which he never looked back and finally obtained an unequivocal victory over Spasskij by 12.5 to 8.5, even if in the second part of the tournament the strengths of the two contenders seemed to rebalance . This event cemented two milestones in Fischer's career: the ambition of being world chess champion and being the player with the highest Elo rating ever (a rating of 2785, the first in the world to go above 2700). Fischer's victory was also considered something of a propaganda victory for the Cold War-era United States, confirming that the world's greatest player, in a sport dominated by the Soviets since the end of World War II, was now an American. In 1975 the time came when Fischer had to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov. Fischer had not played a single official match since he won the title and made binding conditions for the match. FIDE accepted several of his requests, but did not accept his request as to how the match would be won. Starting from the 1949 FIDE congress, the rule was that world championship matches consisted of a maximum number of 24 games, with the first player to score 12.5 points winning. In case of a tie at 12-12, the reigning champion retained the title. Fischer argued that this system encouraged the leading player to draw games, which was not good for chess. He proposed a match with an unlimited number of games, with the first player to ten wins as the winner, draws not counting. If the score reached 9 all, the champion (Fischer) would have retained the title. In effect this meant that Fischer needed to win nine games, while Karpov needed to win ten. FIDE did not accept these conditions and therefore Fischer renounced the title. Karpov became champion by abandoning his opponent. At this point Fischer disappeared and did not play chess in public for almost twenty years. He re-emerged from isolation to challenge Spassky, then in 96th-102nd place in the world rankings, in 1992 in the "revenge of the 20th century" after twenty years of absence from competition. This match, which was played using his new watch, took place in Budva, then in Yugoslavia, generating some controversy, as Yugoslavia was under a harsh UN embargo that included sanctions on sporting events. Fischer insisted that the organizers present the match as "the world chess championship", even though Garry Kasparov was the FIDE-recognized champion at the time. At a press conference before the match, a histrionic Fischer spat on a US State Department document that prohibited Fischer from playing in the Balkan states due to economic sanctions in place. In response, he was indicted and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Since then he has never returned to the United States. The last match of the match against Spassky will remain the last official match of his life. After the match, which Fischer won quite easily, he suddenly disappeared again. In the summer of 1993 he visited the Polgár family, "the royal Hungarian chess family", whose three daughters like him were child prodigies trained in chess by their parents (for Fischer, his mother); they played but also discussed the extermination of the Jews: the girls' four grandparents had survived the concentration camps. On 13 July 2004 he was arrested at Tokyo's "Narita" airport by the Japanese authorities on behalf of the United States of America, officially for an irregular passport. The fact is that the US government had never forgiven Fischer for having played "the revenge of the 20th century" in 1992 in the former Yugoslavia, then under a UN embargo. Boris Spassky, on August 10, 2004, wrote an open letter to the president of the United States in support of his colleague. He was released a few months later when the Icelandic government granted him a passport. After his retreat in Iceland, no trace of him was lost again until the beginning of December 2006, when a program about chess was broadcast on an Icelandic television channel. Two great masters competed live for 30 minutes each. At a certain point the player with black made a mistake and lost. The two opponents then began to analyze the position to find what the correct continuation was. During the analysis, a phone call came to the television studio: it was Bobby Fischer who told the television host live: "I would like to point out that the winning continuation for black is the following", and then provided a sequence of three very spectacular moves. The two great masters hurriedly checked and agreed that the correct plan was the one proposed by Bobby. Although Fischer lived as a recluse, he also demonstrated during that period that he had not lost the ability to create brilliant moves on the board. Precisely in Reykjavík, Iceland, the place where he achieved his greatest chess triumph in 1972, he died suddenly on 17 January 2008 after hospitalization for acute renal failure. His extravagant ways and his private life characterized by loneliness, poor social skills and obsession with the study of chess lead many psychologists to believe that Fischer suffered from Asperger's syndrome. In 1988 Fischer filed a patent application (US Patent number 4 884 255) for a new type of digital chess clock. The Fischer clock allowed the addition of an increment in seconds to the time available to the player making the move. An innovation that in the 2000s allowed the abolition of both the update, which had now become obsolete due to databases and chess engines, and the fall into disuse of the quickplay finish. The new watch was presented to the public by Fischer in his 1992 meeting with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, but it took years before its use became widespread in tournament practice. On June 19, 1996 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) Fischer announced and supported the validity of a chess variant called Scacchi960 or Fischer Random Chess. This is essentially a refinement of an old idea: randomly shuffling the initial arrangement of the pieces (leaving the position of the pawns unchanged and keeping the rooks one to the right and one to the left of the king, to allow for castling). Formally, the game of chess becomes one of the possible starting positions of Chess960, so called because of the 960 possible initial configurations. Fischer believed that this would reduce the importance of memorizing opening moves, thus making creativity and talent more important. The variant has achieved moderate success, with the organization of a small number of matches and tournaments in which the grand masters took part and with the establishment of a world championship of the variant in 2003. As one of the most famous players of chess of all time, Fischer's personality, as well as his game, has been subject to considerable interest, which even resulted in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer.